I’m really starting to regret not studying psychology seriously now. Turning on the TV earlier, all the talk was about mental health. It is, of course, mental health awareness week, but even so it staggers me to hear that one in five people in the country now has a mental health issue. It’s becoming a real issue, and I find myself wishing I understood more about it.

I have written here before about the difficulty I had studying psychology at A-level. Part of that was down to the problems I had getting my head around all the various, competing academic approaches which make up the subject; but I also think part of the problems I had arose from the fact that, as someone with a physical disability, I could never really understand how people could have such severe issues which could not be seen. That is, it perplexed me why anyone would act so abnormally or feel so depressed without having a real physical reason to do so. To a certain extent it still puzzles me. Over the years I have come across many people with physical conditions who have very positive mental outlooks and who just get on with their (often significantly shortened) lives; so why would anyone with no such problems apparently pity their selves so desperately? Another example may be the increasing number of people now hearing ‘voices’ in their head: what is the difference between such a voice and your normal, everyday internal monologue? How can a person tell they are separate, and if they are where does this second or third voice come from? Is it possible that people are paying attention to such voices in order to placate their desire to feel different? After all, we all have internal debates with ourselves.

Naturally, this only betrays my ignorance and lack of understanding. I wish I knew more about these issues. So many people now have mental health issues it’s apparently an epidemic; the same goes for neurological conditions like Autism. However, part of me says people are craving the type of social outsidership I’ve endured all my life: that is, it’s no longer politically or socially fashionable to be straight, white and able-bodied, so people are grouping themselves into whatever minority they can. This goes back to what I wrote here about a type of ‘cultural intrusion’. Could people now be claiming to be mentally ill or have mental health problems without fully understanding what that entails, but simply doing so to claim a form of sociopolitical outsidership? Another example: Is so-called high functioning autism really a neurological disorder, or simply a set of behaviours which were once considered perfectly normal, but which people have now pathologised for sociopolitical reasons? A person then internalises and conforms to such behaviours, consciously or not, so the prophecy fulfils itself. As far as I can tell, high-functioning autism is not debilitating; it does not disable or impair anyone. Yet more and more people seem to be labelling themselves (‘self-diagnosing’) as autistic, and then emphasising their habits which may loosely be considered autistic traits, in order to distance themselves from being perceived as normal.

Yet I know that that cannot be the whole story. People obviously aren’t just claiming to be depressed, hear voices or be otherwise mentally ill just because it’s not politically fashionable to be perceived as ‘normal’ any more. How else do you explain it though? Physical disabilities usually have clear physical causes: in my case it was a lack of oxygen getting to my brain at my birth; in the case of my friends with muscular dystrophy, it was a fault in their DNA. What, then is causing the current staggering influx of mental health issues? Without a tangible physical origin, how else can you explain it without it being, partially at least, the conscious or unconscious desire to be seen as abnormal?

I’m not writing this to offend anyone or to accuse anyone of lying; it just perplexes me how conditions with such ambiguous, intangible origins can be so profound and prevalent. There can be no doubt that mental health issues are very real and that they can be profoundly debilitating; I’m just arguing that part of the reason for their rise may be more social than medical. If you had been around people with severe physical disabilities, wouldn’t you come to the same conclusion too?